Cinetron HD700 Projector Review

January 31, 2010 - Art Feierman

Below: Close up of a computer monitor, from Space Cowboys (Blu-ray), left to right HD700, Sony VPL-HW15, Epson Home Cinema 8500UB, second row: JVC DLA-RS25 and Mitsubishi HC3800. The HD700 holds its own against most, but not a few of the sharpest DLP projectors.

Sharpness - comparison

Cinetron HD700: Bottom Line Sharpness

Apparently good optics, and the usual slight misconvergence add up to a typically sharp 3 chip projector. That said, most DLP projectors will appear a bit sharper – razor sharp, if you will, instead of just sharp.

Actually I like to refer to all 1080p projectors as either average, or “sharper still”. And this one’s an average one. As with my JVC, I do wish it was a touch sharper on digital content. On film based content, the softness of the film tends to negate a fair bit of the difference in sharpness between projectors.

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Light Leakage

No issue at all! (that was easy).

Cinetron HD700 Image Noise

Overall, very good! General motion image noise is about average, and definitely a bit tamer than say, the average DLP projector (they do seem to have more image noise than LCoS or 3LCD projectors).

I noticed no troubling, obvious artifacts, although I admit I’m not always the best at spotting them sometimes. Nothing ever jumped out at me during my viewing sessions as being a problem. I’d say pretty typical overall, which should come as no surprise, because like with most big brand projectors, Cinetron outsources much of their image processing. As it turns out, they use Silicon Optix HQV. Some of the other brands that use Silicon Optix processing include JVC and Epson. That’s pretty fine company to keep.

HD700 Audible Noise

The Cinetron HD700 is pretty quiet to begin with, and even better, lower pitched than most projectors. From a spec standpoint Cinetron says 24 db. What they don’t say, is if that’s lamp on high or low brightness. Usually when there’s just one spec, it’s the low power spec.

I wouldn’t worry about it, though, the projector is quieter than my JVC, and I think, any of the other LCoS projectors, and quieter than the Epson UB projector, as well as any of the competing DLP projectors.

Bottom line, below average noise levels, and thanks to low pitch, extremely unlikely that noise will be a problem for you. If you find the HD700 too noisy, that probably means you wouldn’t be happy with 75% of the home theater projectors on the market.